All right. We know.

We've been scarce lately. And we're sorry. It's been a little nuts since the stupid Kitten came to live with us. Bandit has lost a lot of his eyesight, and Maggie, well, she's still cranky as ever.
In other words, we're fine.

Summer's here and the staff is finally spending some time around the house. It's a holiday weekend, and we generally expect our annual road trip and some Wimbledon action. This week, they've got us all discombobulated. But we did get to go riding, so that's a start.

Many holiday miles

We've gotten some miles on us over the past weeks -- been through four different states in the limo, but the staff's avoided Alabama for once so that's a plus.

(Careful readers know Maggie's a 'Bama native, so we can't be too harsh. But, when she has particularly impertinent days, Bandit's fond of saying "You can take the girl out of Phenix City......")

Anyway, we had a very nice visit with grandma, Aunt Audrey and Cousin Ellen in NC. Ellen is pretty cool because she's got a long dog, too, named Duncan. It's a Corgi, and we accept those as extended family. (Extended...get it?)

Now we're at the beach. It's raining, so that makes the walks a bit shorter because Staffer Dad doesn't like water on his head and he can't handle us and an umbrella. The beach trip was nice -- we got to stop at our fave walk area at the Osceola Forest. We stopped once other time at Staffer Mom's fave truck stop near Tallahassee (good coffee). That was the best! We found gum in the parking lot near the car. Staffer Mom wasn't very happy about that, but it was good stuff. Peppermint, maybe.

It might clear off tomorrow, so we'll be walking more. It's been windy here, and we saw some overturned trash cans down the street. Score!

Vacation snooze

We've been due for some time out after having to deal with the kitten for a few weeks. The staff obliged this weekend.
They took us to our favorite place: the beach.

We've spent most of our time wisely, sleeping, walking and watching Wimbledon. Aunt Jenn has been around to run us through some Yoga practice -- we prefer the term Doga, but whatever. At left, you'll see a move Maggie likes to call Downward Facing Dog Facing Dog.

Today, we get to chase birds off the deck!

Endless food; gas for the road

From Maggie: Ernie, our cat friend, has a food dish the staff calls a "self-feeder."
When he wants to eat, he can walk up to it and it always has food. A small chute in the back provides an endless supply, it seems. We've always been jealous of that, but we never could get close to it because the staff won't let us eat cat food. Patience does pay, however, and yesterday was payday.

By the time the staff arrived home from work, we'd discovered that the supply is not endless. In fact, once it's empty, it's gone. When we got access to the bowl early in the day, we decided to learn its secret. We decided the way to do this was for Bandit to just keep eating until it was clear how it worked. We still don't know how it works, but we do know the staff wouldn't give us any dinner and they weren't the least impressed with our research.

What else we didn't know was that we were supposed to leave on a road trip last night -- they tend to not tell us this stuff because Staffer Mom says I get "overly excited." Whatever.
They piled us into the limo and took us on a 8-hour trip to one of our fave places -- the beach.
We felt like sleeping on the trip, because our tummies were full. Bandit was complaining of some tummy upset. He even turned down the opportunity to rummage through Staffer Mom's purse when she left it sitting open.

We didn't get much sleep though. Let's just say that while we were very full and calm, our tummies weren't.
Staffer Mom kept opening the back windows and yelling at us. At one point she called us some kind of "blossom" and cursed at us.

It's all the staff's fault. If we hadn't had access to the cat food, we wouldn't have had upset tummies and we wouldn't have tried to figure out how much food was in the bowl. What were we supposed to do? Just look at it?

Gotta run. Bandit needs to go outside again, and I want to watch.

We see, monkey do

Wow. What a holiday! We went to the beach. We rode lots of miles. We walked a lot in the sand and got a lot of sandspurs in our paws. (Luckily, we're really good at pulling them out on our own.)
We saw our aunts and uncles and made new friends. But with all that, we got a bit irritated. It seems that all the humans had a new friend, too. They adopted an inflatable monkey and took it everywhere we should have gone. They said since some folks couldn't be there, they'd take the monkey everywhere and send pictures to those who missed out. So wait a minute: They have 2 perfectly fine dachshunds and decide to take the monkey all over town? What is the deal?
If they hadn't kept it up on top of the refrigerator, that monkey would have a few puncture wounds as souvenirs.

Time out

It's possible that we'll be offline for a few days as we play at the beach.
If we are, we're sorry for the silence, but we promise to let you know everything we learn over the holiday.
Happy New Year!

Par-tay!

We'd like to share a few milestones we hit this week:
- We've posted our 100th blog entry. (Not bad for mammals with no thumbs.)
- Our page views topped 1300. (What are you all thinking?)

We'll be celebrating those and our New Year's at the beach this year -- the staff finally told us they'd take us down there for our own party.
So, if you're in the area, we'll be on Pensacola Beach on New Year's Eve. We're not likely to see someone get Tasered this time, but there's always hope.

Come on by...it's the pink house before the spaceship. Look for the lights on the deck!

Winter at the beach

We know that most people like to go to the beach in the summer, but we've always been partial to winter. First of all, there are fewer cars, less noise, and it's beautiful. The deck boards and pavement don't burn our paws, either. The sunsets are incredible. We can see them from the back porch on the deck. It's rare that we can see tall things or big things up high, but out there we can see the world. We like that.

Car trip!!!!

We’ve been gone for a few days, and we apologize for the silence. We hope we can make up for it with this post.
We decided to try to do what we believe is the first live blog by wiener dogs. Sadly, it couldn’t get posted as quickly as we’d hoped since the wireless signals weren’t working. Oh well. We told the staff we needed better technology. Here's our live blog copied over to a post from our trip.


THURSDAY: Early this morning we saw Dad take the leashes out to the limo….and that meant only one thing: Road trip!
He thought he could get them past us, but no way. Then we heard the hatch on the limo pop, and we knew it was going to be more than a quick trip to Forsyth Park – Grandmas’s house? A visit to Sidda and Seamus? Wait.
Watch for it….watch for it….there goes Dad’s white music block and funny ear things…. a couple bags of junk food….watch for it….. Mom’s packing up 2 bottles of wine and …….watch for it…….a bottle of tequila! WE’RE GOING TO THE BEACH!!!!!

In the car! In the car!
Mom says if we don’t calm down, we can’t do our live blog. She’s willing to type, but we have to focus. We’ve never blogged a road trip before, and we know our regular crew will want to know what happens along the way. Staffer Dad, our driver, says he’ll even roll down the windows for us now and then.

8:20: We’re pulling out now….but Driver Dad says we’ll have to stop for gas and breakfast. We don’t know why. We’ve already eaten and Bandit has plenty of gas.

Drive-through windows are torture for us. It generally means that others get food and rudely eat in front of us. This time was no different. If we could only taste that Egg McMuffin…..
As we’re jolted back to reality, Driver Dad tells Bandit to keep his nose out of the hash brown. (Is that what they call that squished brown thing?)

We’re not even a few miles out of town and Driver Dad’s already cursing the left-lane drivers. We wonder if that old lady even knows she’s keeping us from getting to the beach.

Uh oh.
Bandit’s in trouble. He just started pulling stuff out of Staffer Mom’s purse again to look for gum. She didn’t have any, but he did hit paydirt with a few old Tums. Last time he got in her purse, he punctured her Belk’s charge card right through the magnetic strip and she wasn’t happy about that. We’re going to take a nap for a bit so she’ll chill.

Rest stop!
Mile 318 on I-10: We love rest stops! And this is one of our favorites on the way to the beach. It has great smells and deep grass. Today someone’s been piling up pine straw in little piles all over the dog park. We were able to pee on every pile! Almost missed one, but Bandit hit it as we had to head for the car. You have to set goals, you know.

Seems like there are a lot of cows out there. Must be cool to sit in the field and watch cars all day. It might get boring after a bit, but we bet they see lots of neat stuff.
We saw one truck with some neat art on the back of it that said Mtha Fkr on it. We’re not sure what that stands for. Mom says that good graffiti artists should know how to spell. We don’t think she should edit art.
We’ve also seen a lot of big boxy cars that Mom says are full of “snowbirds.” So why can’t they just fly where they are going? Mom says they are too old. Dad told her to be careful about making remarks about old people.


Have you ever noticed how kudzu vines make big trees look like big monsters hanging over the road? They aren’t monsters, though, because they didn’t run when we barked at them.

OH WOW! Mom says the next stop is to see LASSIE! Maggie’s always liked the Lassie legend, but never really believed one dog could be all that great. In general, we’d like to meet a dog that is recognized by humans to have more sense than most humans. This is exciting!

We just passed a sign that said “Dog Track.” Is that bigger than a Dog Run or Dog Walk?
Mom says we can’t stop there. But we want to!

Mile 216 on I-10: Dead animal update:
Raccoons: 4
Deer: 1
Possum: 3
Chickens: 1
Old truck tires: 9 (We know they aren’t animals, but they make funny shapes on the side of the road, so they are worth counting.)

OH NO.
This is terrible. Mom didn’t say “to see Lassie.” She said Tallahassee. There’s nothing here. This is awful. We really wanted to see Lassie. DAMMIT.

Mile 158 on I-10: We just got behind two double-decker trucks full of real live cows. Mom thought it smelled nasty, but we thought it was pretty wonderful. Driver Dad did roll down the window for us as we passed. We like the window down, but all the nice cow smell went away.


Bridge! We’re across the water and we see a train and a bunch of men in orange vests and trucks and lots of concrete. This was the bridge that fell in the water during the storm, but it looks pretty sturdy to us. The air smells good.

And now we’re in Pensacola and there’s another bridge and lots of birds. And more cars and more birds.
Hey! There are our toll booth friends with the cool shirts with big flowers and the big water tanks with dolphins on them. We’re at the beach. FINALLY.

Final trip tally:
Dead Raccoons: 4
Dead Deer: 1
Dead Possum: 5
Dead Chickens: 1
Old truck tires: 15
Slow people in the left lane worth cursing: 5
People who fell prey to the blue light people: 7
Men in orange vests: 4 small herds.


4 p.m. Central: We’re here; we’re on the deck. It’s dinner time! Where’s the food?